To Wake the Dead

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To Wake the Dead
Author	John Dickson Carr
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Gideon Fell
Genre(s)	Mystery, Detective novel
Publisher	Hamish Hamilton (UK) & Harper (USA)
Publication date	1938
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	222 pp (Popular Library #10, paperback edition, 1941)
Preceded by	The Arabian Nights Murder (1936)
Followed by	The Crooked Hinge (1938)

To Wake the Dead, first published in 1938, is a detective story by John Dickson Carr featuring his series detective Gideon Fell. This novel is a mystery of the type known as a whodunnit.

[edit] Plot summary

Christopher Kent is a wealthy young man who has made a thousand-pound bet with his friend Dan Reaper that he cannot start at Johannesburg without a penny in his pocket and meet his friend at the Royal Scarlet Hotel in Piccadilly in London, England, some weeks later. Twenty-four hours before the deadline, Kent is in front of the hotel, penniless and not having eaten for a day, and decides to order breakfast and charge it to a room in the hotel. After he's finished breakfast, the hotel staff ask him to go and wake up his "wife" because a previous guest has left a valuable bracelet hidden in the room. Upon arrival at room 707, the group is met by a "Do not disturb" sign upon which has been scrawled "Dead woman"; Kent lets himself in and finds, unsurprisingly, the strangled body of his cousin Josephine. When Kent asks master detective Gideon Fell to extricate him from his predicament, Fell must also solve the murder of Josephine's late husband Rodney, which had happened two weeks earlier.

The first murder had taken place at the country home of Sir Gyles Gay; Sir Giles had acquired it from the estate of its architect, Ritchie Bellowes, and maintains Bellowes' drunkard son as a hanger-on in the household. Sir Gyles had invited a number of Kent's friends and relatives for a house party where young Bellowes entertained the party with a demonstration of his photographic memory. Late one night, while extremely drunk, Bellowes sneaks into his former home and claims to have seen a man dressed as a hotel attendant, "wearing a uniform such as you see in the big hotels like the Royal Scarlet". Bellowes passes out and is found in the morning about the same time as the strangled body of Rodney Kent is discovered.

There are a number of mysterious clues and indications, including a defaced photograph of the house party enjoying itself at a "fun fair", the fact that all the coins (but not the bills) are missing from the dead woman's purse, and two valuable bracelets, one with a mysterious Latin expression carved into its face. But it is a surprising and violent confrontation in a darkened cemetery that allows Gideon Fell to conclusively identify the murderer.

v • d • e Gideon Fell series by John Dickson Carr

Novels:	Hag's Nook • The Mad Hatter Mystery • The Blind Barber • The Eight of Swords • Death-Watch • The Hollow Man (aka The Three Coffins) • The Arabian Nights Murder • To Wake the Dead • The Crooked Hinge • The Black Spectacles (aka The Problem of the Green Capsule) • The Problem of the Wire Cage • The Man Who Could Not Shudder • The Case of the Constant Suicides • Death Turns the Tables • Till Death Do Us Part • He Who Whispers • The Sleeping Sphinx • Below Suspicion • The Dead Man's Knock • In Spite of Thunder • The House at Satan's Elbow • Panic in Box C • Dark of the Moon

Short story collections:	Dr. Fell, Detective, and Other Stories • The Men Who Explained Miracles • Fell and Foul Play